Billy Bean Is MLB’s Ambassador for Inclusion. What Does That Mean?

During the All-Star break, Major League Baseball made a momentous announcement, naming Billy Bean as its first Ambassador for Inclusion. (This is Billy Bean, the former outfielder, not Billy Beane, the current general manager of the Athletics.) “Inclusion” is a broad term, but the mandate was clear: Bean, who came out in 1999 after his 1995 retirement, is the only living gay major leaguer, and his job will be to help pave the way for LGBT people within the sport to feel comfortable coming out. He is the first professional hired by a major league with the mandate to improve conditions for gay players.

That may be because baseball feels it has some catching up to do. Seventy-seven years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in the major leagues, baseball appears to be lagging behind the NBA and NFL. Pro basketball player Jason Collins came out in 2013 and football lineman Michael Sam came out in early 2014, before the NFL draft; now baseball and hockey are the two major team sports without an active openly gay player.

Bean acknowledges that Sam and Collins may have provided baseball with an impetus. “I’m proud of baseball,” Bean said in a telephone interview. “I think the bravery and courage of Jason and Michael are going to make it better for everyone. Maybe seeing those examples is what made baseball call me.”

Bean was not the first major leaguer to declare himself gay. That would be Glenn Burke, who came out in a 1982 magazine article, not long after his 1979 retirement. Burke died of AIDS in 1995, two decades before the league hired Bean. His sister, Lutha Burke, attended and spoke at the All-Star Fanfest ceremony at which Bean was appointed.

Burke played on a team and in a time when being out was nearly impossible. His manager, Tommy Lasorda, never acknowledged that his son Tommy Jr. was gay — not even after Tommy Jr. died in 1991 of complications related to AIDS. “Deep inside, I know the Dodgers traded me because I was gay,” Burke told his interviewer for the article.

It may take time for teams and teammates to adjust. That is the most charitable reading of comments like this one in July from former NFL coach Tony Dungy. “I wouldn’t have taken [Michael Sam],” he told the Tampa Bay Times. “Not because I don’t believe Michael Sam should have a chance to play, but I wouldn’t want to deal with all of it. It’s not going to be totally smooth … things will happen.”

Dungy is expressing a very vague worry — so much so that his comment and others like it have frequently been dismissed as concern trolling — but there’s some precedent for concern, at least in the early going. Baseball writer Allen Barra remembered an interview that he had done with Larry Doby, the man who integrated the American League a few months after Jackie Robinson integrated the National League in 1947. “When I talked to Larry Doby, he told me that by the second year there was a general acceptance, that most people didn’t care,” Barra recalled in a telephone interview. “He was always, though, conscious of the fact that he was being thrown at and knocked down.”

The integration of gay players into baseball invites inevitable comparisons to Jackie Robinson crossing the color line. And it is not an unfair comparison. “I think that socially and historically it is every bit as significant,” says Barra, a biographer of Willie Mays. But times have changed, and largely for the better.

The bigger problem may just be the outsized standard to live up to. “It’s a terrible burden to place on the next gay baseball player to say that he has got to rival Jackie Robinson,” says John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball. Robinson was a Hall of Famer, one of the greatest second basemen who ever lived. The use of the phrase “gay Jackie Robinson” may do more harm than good, if it causes a role player to worry whether he’s a good enough ballplayer to be able to be first.

And yet, for the past 30 years, since Burke’s article, Major League Baseball has been waiting for a “gay Jackie Robinson,” a phrase that’s so cliched that it deserves a cliched descriptor: a Google search for that phrase yields 226,000 results. The anticipation reached a fever pitch a decade ago. The editor of Out Magazinewrote a piece in 2001 that began: “For the past year and a half, I have been having an affair with a pro baseball player from a major-league East Coast franchise.” In 2002, Mets manager Bobby Valentine said in an interview that he thought that baseball was “probably ready for an openly gay player.” Shortly thereafter, the New York Post — again — printed a rumor that Mets star Mike Piazza was gay. That prompted Piazza to give an informal press conference, announcing, “First off, I’m not gay. I’m heterosexual. That’s pretty much it.”

And that pretty much was it. No baseball player has come out since Piazza’s press conference. Baseball clearly hopes that Bean will change that. But Bean is more circumspect about his goals for the players that he will advise. “If they felt like they had the resources in front of them, and if they were making an adverse decision, I would tell them to go with their heart,” he says. “It’s my job as they work to make that an easier decision. I don’t want a person to be judged.”

Only one other openly gay man has participated on a major league field: Dave Pallone, an umpire who was outed in a New York Post article. After that, Major League Baseball quickly fired him. He is glad that Bean will be in a position to help players decide to come out on their own terms. “I truly believe that this could be the catalyst to have some of the major league baseball players who happen to be gay to finally come out,” he said by telephone. “I think you find that people play harder and better when they’re free.”

Bean and Pallone bear deep scars from their experiences. Bean was so afraid of being outed that he refused to ask his team for time off to attend his partner’s funeral, explaining in his autobiography that he had done so because he worried that “someone might start asking why I cared enough about the guy to attend.” Pallone had to endure the additional public humiliation of being accused of participating in a teen sex ring — an accusation that was later withdrawn. But he could not deny that he was gay. “I wasn’t ready at that time for everyone to know, in 1988,” Pallone said. “For someone to be forced to talk about a secret that they have not prepared to talk about is nothing less than psychological rape.”

A big part of the reason that the issue is complicated is one of appearance. Jackie Robinson could not pass as white; Billy Bean could and did pass as straight. Gay players have come and gone through baseball, many of them known to their teammates (like Burke) but not to their fans. Baseball’s first openly gay active player will need to make a doubly difficult choice: not just to be out to their family and friends, but to total strangers. “It is inviting the judgment of other people,” says Bean. “It’s a very generous decision to come out.”

Bean’s first step will be to connect with each individual team, and to help the league to craft a unified message that the league will broadcast to players. He views the mission as educational. “I know from my experience, when you’re submerged in that world as a player, you don’t have time to evolve emotionally and intellectually as you do physically,” he says. “You want to give them the same opportunity to succeed outside the lines as well as inside the lines.”

Building those bridges will be important, because the explicit incentive structure still makes it difficult for a player to shoulder the uncertain burden of coming out. But Bean will not be the only person working on it. On the same day that it announced Bean’s position, Major League Baseball announced that it was deepening its partnership with an organization called Athlete Ally, which seeks to build ranks of straight allies of LGBT players and officials in professional sports.

Hudson Taylor, the founder of Athlete Ally, explains that many of the obstacles can be unseen. “I think the biggest challenge in the sports world is even when you have a nondiscrimination policy in place, unless you’re the number one athlete at your position, there will always be a hint of fear that your orientation will negatively affect your employment,” he said in an interview. “If we as a collective community can show that there’s no risk to coming out, that in fact it’s welcomed and wanted, we can get to a place where an athlete doesn’t have to be afraid.”

To Thorn, that is what makes this move so meaningful. “I think it is a significant advance over simply the responsiveness that the NFL has employed to Michael Sam’s being drafted,” he said. “What MLB has done here is to create a welcoming environment and a league-wide mandate for inclusion. We have taken steps to make sure that the road that gays have to travel will be simpler, will be easier, than Jackie in 1947.”

By mandating the full support of the league and the teams, Bean’s office will ensure that players will not face the open hostility of other players and other managers, as Robinson and Doby faced at the hands of managers like the notoriously racist Ben Chapman. “I don’t think you’re going to see any Ben Chapmans go after any gay players in baseball,” says Barra. “Anybody who would demonstrate against this in a ballpark would be removed.”

In the end, success probably will not be measured by the number of out athletes in any sport. It will be measured by the amount of attention that greets every subsequent player who comes out. Pallone put it simply: Bean will have succeeded if “his appointment doesn’t mean as much in a year or two as it did when it was made at the All-Star Game in 2014. Because we’ve made so many strides that it’s just a matter of fact.”

For his part, Bean is sanguine. “It’s a tremendous honor for me personally to be asked back into baseball,” Bean says. “Basically for the same reason I left it.”

No need to be Jackie Robinson level talent, just a solid big leaguer who does what any other professional would do. I’m betting Michael Sam has a long enough NFL career to allow others to be comfortable coming out before the tail end of their career (like Jason Collins). Having Bean as an official source of MLB support would certainly help whoever becomes baseball’s equivalent of Sam.

7th round picks sometimes catch on big time but, yes, most do not have a substantial careers. Also, I wouldn’t read too much into the sack. Sam’s problem in college was he dominated bad teams but struggled badly against good teams with, presumably, good offensive lines. I do not think he has been facing the first stringers in the pre-season. There are lots of players who look All-Pro against the pre-season third string that do not translate against the first string.

The comparison to Jackie Robinson is simpy inappropriate. Robinson came up in a time when racism was prevalent almost everywhere in the United States. In some places in the South, black people had to step off the sidewalk when whites approached. It’s nothing like that now for gays; if someone had come out fifteen or twenty years ago, the comparison might have been more appropriate. But, today, you have courts and legislatures legalizing gay marriage, and the culture is far more open to gay people than it was to African-Americans when Robinson came up. I do suspect a gay baseball player might have more trouble than in other sports, simply because baseball players are generally less educated and more insular than football and basketball. But, while I do agree that the civil rights issue is similar, I think it does a disservice to what Robinson went through to compare what a gay player is likely to endure today to what Robinson and others went through.

I try to address those points in the piece. Socially and historically it is as significant, as Barra says. But obviously, you’re correct that culturally, the integration of gay players will be a lot easier — and a great deal less violent — than Jackie breaking the color line. But part of the reason that it will be easier is that baseball has taken a step that it did not take, could not take, in 1947: create a league office that officially endorses integration. Jackie, and the many African-American players who entered baseball in his wake, were largely on their own, surrounded by a lot of hostile white faces. Gay players today will not be alone, because they will have the league’s backing.

Currently, baseball is the only sport of those three in which a substantial number of players jump straight from high school to the pros. In the NBA, you have to play at least a year in college (or go to Europe, like Brandon Jennings). In the NFL, generally speaking, no one’s physically mature enough to jump to the pros until their junior or senior year. If a shrimpy high school senior went straight to the NFL, he’d get killed. That isn’t the case with someone like Clayton Kershaw or Bryce Harper.

The college education received by basketball and football players on the path to professional leagues is of truly zero value. Additionally, the culture around baseball is less thoroughly anti-intellectual than that around either of the other big three male sports in the United States. I predict that if every NBA, NFL, and MLB player took the GRE, the MLB players would have the highest mean and median scores and the most results that are actually halfway decent.

I wonder if that’s true. Many baseball players from Latin America are signed when they’re 16, and many of them leave their regular school and start playing in baseball-specific environments when they’re 14. They receive far less than even the pretense of a full high school education.

I would venture to guess that American-born baseball players come from families with a higher per capita income than American-born basketball and football players, but when you factor in the international players in each league, I don’t know what the end result would be.

Myself, I would think if you’re currently closeted and debating the switch from in to out, I don’t know that you’d want a whole stinkin’ office waiting just for you. If you’re currently in, it’s likely because you don’t want any part of a circus.

This is a PR stunt for Major League Baseball and a feel-good thing for you liberal types. Both of which I’m fine with, PR is a fact of socioeconomic life, feeling good beats feeling bad, and as a nonpartisan myself I got nothing more against you liberals than I do against them conservatives.

But if you really wanted this office to accomplish what it’s supposedly supposed to accomplish, you’d keep it absolutely low-key. SOME-one will come out some time, and when they do they’ll have to smile and put up with this Office stuff now, too. But I’m thinking publicizing this new Office will put that day farther off rather than bring it closer. To actually appreciate having your whole own Office of Coming Out, you’ll have to have more than a little Reggie Jackson in you.

Coming out of the closet can invite a media circus, it’s true. But being in the closet is just psychologically exhausting. You constantly have to measure everything you’re saying to try to determine whether it is likely to compromise your secret, and you constantly have to remember who knows and who doesn’t — most closeted people have friends who know that they’re gay, and other friends who have no idea, and it is a lot to ask of those friends to make sure that they watch everything that they say as closely as you watch everything that you say.

The whole point of Billy Bean’s office is to ensure that, if a player wants to come out, they have a support network. Eventually, enough players will be out that it won’t be a big deal. Until then, they have enough resources to make an informed decision without feeling exorbitant pressure either way.

This is the 21st Century, and I have been in the front lines of the gay rights movement for over 40 years. For many years,the movement moved at a snails pace. I knew Glenn Burke when he was with the Dodgers back in 77, and during the off season he was playing in a charity basketball game between gay athletes and S.F. firemen. I was working for a gay newspaper and they asked me to take photo’s of a practice. Glenn asked me not to take any photos of him and I respected his request. We became friends. There is a fine documentary called OUT-The Glenn Burke Story. I recommend it to all jocks,gay or straight and evn people who might not be interested in sports. I had a brief cameo in it.

One of the best things to happen to the gay rights movement was Anita Bryant… her anti-gay rhetoric helped to brings all segments of the gay communities together to fight back and gave the movement… movement. I created the ANITA BRYANT’S HUSBAND ISA HOMO SAPIEN! T-Shirt and outed myself nationally at a time it was not yet fashionable to be openly gay,even in San Francisco! I played in the first gay softball league in the country and within th first few years,some teams started to recruit non-gays. Looking back that was great! It was the times of Anita Bryant and California State Senator John Briggs, who got on the ballot an igniative to ban all gay teachers in or out if the closet. The team I played on had a great mix… A doctor,2 Vietnam vets,real estate man and a banker. They brought their parents,wives,girl friends and kids to our games. Even mayor Moscone threw out the first pitch of the season in front of 2,000 fans. He gave our team a City Proclomation congratulating us on our Championship season and the great diversity on our roster that truly represented the diversity of San Francisco.

Like Billy Bean, I was inducted into the National Gay & Lesbian Sports Hall of fame. For over 25 years I was known as the Bleacher Preacher in and around the friendly confines of Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Harry Caray had me as a guest on his 10th Inning Show and introduced me as JOHN Q. PUBLIC,the FAN! In ’87 he tabbed me as the Cubs #1 fan. I spoke out on 2001 when Cubs pitcher Julio Taverez made anti gay remarks and it was picked up nationally by the Sporting News. I have been involved in the OUT @ WRIGLEY, that just had their 14th annual day for gays,the longest gay event in M.L.B.

I actually offered my service to MLB,as a fan adviser,however at this time they were not interested. The time is right for gays in all endeavors. Being gay does not make you a better athlete,entertainer or hairdresser and neither does being straight,too!

“Dungy is expressing a very vague worry — so much so that his comment and others like it have frequently been dismissed as concern trolling…”

You do know that Michael Sam had a reality show lined up before he was drafted, right? Apparently that came as a surprise to the NFL and they had that quickly nixed. The man was intentionally trying to be a distraction before he was even drafted, not something that is valued in 7th round picks. Dungy’s opinion was, at least partially, well founded in past behavior. (To his credit, Sam has since behaved himself and stuck to the football field for making statements, as any professional should.)

Many other people have made comments much like that — and made roughly the same comments when Jason Collins came out, while he was still trying to sign with another team — talking about what a “distraction” it would be. Many of those comments, but not all of them, were very likely concern trolling, basically projecting onto others the feelings that you’re unwilling to admit having yourself. It basically goes like this: “I wish that person wouldn’t do that thing. I don’t have any problem with it, but there are so many other people that have a problem with it that it will only cause trouble if that person does it.”

Now, again, Dungy may have had a legitimate point, and it may have been related to the reality show. But he made a comment very similar to comments that other people have made, and not all of those comments have been in good faith. I have no wish to slam Dungy. Indeed, I grant that there are valid reasons for worry. But there are a lot of people who have expressed the same concern in bad faith, and that needs to be acknowledged.

If the primary concern is distraction, then why is being gay any different than being one of the myriad of professional athletes with criminal and addiction histories? Does being gay generate more media attention than a DUI, sexual assault, domestic violence, or any other of the dozens of infractions we see on an average week?

It certainly shouldn’t. But, for now, it does, due to the typical rubbernecking of the exotic that powers the drive-by news cycle. There are a number of violent offenders in the NFL. There’s only one gay player. That will change as more players come out. But for now it is a big deal. That’s why coming out takes such courage, and why it’s so important for players to have support as they weigh their choice of when and whether to do so.

hopbitters: Quite true. However, if someone with the same perceived talent level as Michael Sam had a history of bad behavior or drug addiction, it is likely that someone would not be drafted or, at least, would be skipped by many teams until some team valued him enough, perhaps confident that “we know how to handle that,” to take a chance. Coming into the draft Sam was seen as roughly the football equivalent of a replacement player. If a baseball team was picking the 25th man for the roster and one candidate insisted on being trailed by film crews and was regularly found on the front page of the gossip section and/or police blotter, I suspect the team would go in a different direction. (Of course, such scrutiny does not usually apply to star talent. It’s the difference between “I can’t replace this guy’s production” and “there are a dozen more readily available guys just like you so I don’t need to put up with your baggage.”)

On a right-now basis, sure. But in the long run, you can only write so many stories about a guy coming out. He’s not going to do it again, so the best you can hope for (as somebody looking for a story, that is) is that he gets married or breaks up with his partner. But again, a one shot deal. There are no judges, lawyers, victims, trial dates, community service, or anything you can drag a few more articles out of. Once you get past that initial revelation, which will become more and more of a blip every time it happens, there’s not much drama left.

Sure, there will people who don’t like him or don’t approve of him, but you can say that about anybody. He’s not going to be missing any time for court appearances. He’s not going to get suspended for failing league sexuality testing. Now maybe you really don’t want to deal with what drama there is purely on the basis of the not-rocking-the-boat mentality and that’s OK, but you can’t single out the gay guy and let in anybody else with a glimmer of distraction in their eyes without scrutiny.

I disagree with the notion that the college experience of football and basketball players is worthless. Sure, they aren’t generally there for the education and they are often isolated from the regular students, but I think being on a campus has some effect, especially compared to kids coming straight out of high school-often from very conservative communities. On the other hand, there is often a great deal of homophobia in minority communities. My impression is that baseball is the most anti-intellectual of the major US sports-it’s only the intellectualism of the sabermetric fan community that makes it seem more intellectual. If you look at how managers manage compared to how football coaches coach (what football coach would do something based on a “gut feeling” as managers often do?). .

It’s amazing that people talk about this as a “distraction” as if players live in a bubble and have no other distractions. By that standard, teams should not allow players to llive with their families; kids are a distraction too. I wonder how much of this is people simply not knowing (or being aware of ) gay people and assuming that they will be out trolling for sex all the time in the locker room. In other words, I think, perhaps Dungy and others, think that gay players would act the way straight players would if they went in a woman’s locker room, ie, being so horny that they couldn’t function. There are, I am sure, players who would feel uncomfortable undressing in front of a gay player because he thinks the player would be checking him out (as the straight player would be checking out a woman if he were in their locker room.)

If contemporary civil rights and hate crimes legislation had been around in 1947, then every NL team would have been in trouble with the feds. That precious antitrust exemption might have come under the microscope by the feds.

Today no one would dare to treat an admitted homosexual ballplayer the way NL players treated Jackie Robinson in 1947. Each player shouting slurs would be in trouble individually, his team would be in trouble, and all of MLB would be in trouble.

But there is a way to preempt or at least minimize legal problems: sensitivity training. Some of you might have been through that in the workplace. After employees are compelled to attend one of these sessions, if something goes amiss on the job, the employer can say, “Hey, we don’t countenance this sort of thing…it’s against our policy…look, here it is in black and white…we even brought in a sensitivity/diversity expert! Surely, you can’t hold us liable! What more could we have done?”

So the hiring of Billy Bean is a high-profile part of the whole CYA process, and a pretty good PR move. I don’t know what they’re paying him, but if he can keep the feds off MLB’s back and keep grandstanding congressmen and senators from taking a closer look at that antitrust exemption, then he will be worth every penny.

I disagree that this is merely CYA 101. If that’s all it were, then you would think that the NFL, NHL, and NBA would have announced similar plans. Thus far, and to their credit, MLB is way out ahead on this.